The Summer of Jessica Biel

To celebrate Biel’s being in a movie actually worth seeing, we sent Adam Stein to play carnival games with her

When I told various friends I’d be interviewing Jessica Biel, I got the responses you’d expect—jealousy, mild rage, a plea to give her a phone number because she’s the one person that a friend’s wife would give him a free pass to sleep with. The uncanny thing is, when I asked these guys what they thought of her as an actress, most of them drew a blank. They hadn’t seen a single motion picture of hers. Okay, one or two had girlfriends who’d brought them to see The Illusionist, but otherwise, nada. As my friend Taj put it: “I’m obsessed with a girl I’ve never seen move.“

Well, that’s about to change. Later this month, men across America will see Jessica being very good in a very funny movie, and the nature of their love for her will…deepen. She’ll still be inhumanly beautiful, sure, but now they’ll have to contend with genuine talent, too, and that one-two punch can be disorienting. You know what else can? The fact that despite her recent tabloid exposure, she’s actually sweet, funny, earnest, occasionally a little crude, and—if my time playing carnival games with her can be used as evidence—uniquely driven to conquer whatever stands between Jessica Biel and what she wants.

I am waiting for her at the Santa Monica Pier, sitting on a stool next to one of those games where you shoot water from a gun into a clown’s mouth. I haven’t shaved for a week, because I read somewhere that Jessica Biel likes guys with beards. I’m inspecting mine in the reflective back of my iPod when a nice-looking young woman materializes in my view.

“Excuse me,“ she says. “Are you Adam?“

“Jessica?“ I ask, ridiculously.

Of course it’s her, in wraparound sunglasses, an open gray sweater over a white blouse, and faded jeans. She wears checkered Vans, like Jeff Spicoli. On the pier, no one recognizes her, which I suppose makes sense: There’s little resemblance between the pinup girl and the sneaker-wearing civilian out on a Monday afternoon. She doesn’t stick out as we walk the wooden planks of the amusement park; she blends in. She is, you might say, a very chill girl.

“Can we get a photo next to a star?“ she asks, stopping in front of a booth hawking photographs with huge cardboard cutouts of celebrities. It’s an impressive, eclectic array: Bill Clinton, Mini Me, Michael Jordan, Hilary Duff, Enrique Iglesias(!), Jean-Claude Van Damme, DiCaprio in Titanic. “They’re all kind of old,“ she says. I don’t know if she means the cutouts or the celebrities themselves (because to me, Mini Me will never age). She’s only 25 years old, so it could go either way. I ask her who she’d most want to pose with. She scrutinizes the assembly and makes her call: “I’d probably pick Van Damme, cause he looks the coolest.“

She takes the Muscles from Brussels over Leo—a victory of might over sensitivity. Nice.

Then she decides it’s time for the games to begin. She passes up the Riptide Ring Toss (“That one is impossible,“ she says) and focuses her attention on the Pier Plank Plunge. The PPP is basically a rope ladder suspended horizontally over an inflatable mattress. The trick is to climb, perfectly balanced, to a taunting red button placed approximately ten feet away. Press the button, win the prize—an enormous Sonic the Hedgehog.

I ask her if she’s ever Pier Plank Plunged before. “Yes,“ she says, assessing the structure, looking for its weaknesses. “But I’ve never been able to achieve it.“ She begins barraging the bored-looking carny with questions. “Do you have any tips?“ (It’s all about balance.) “Have you done it before?“ (Nope.) “Has anyone ever won?“ (Yeah.) “Has anyone won today?“ (Not yet.)

She turns to me, and I have to say she seems genuinely excited. “This is our chance,“ she says. “It’s our chance to win.“

I’m beginning to get the distinct impression that winning is important to Jessica Biel.

“Ladies first“ being the imperative, I take the initial go-round. It’s harder than it looks. My arms shake. Everything shakes. I can feel her hopefulness—Do it, get there—but I fall off within seconds. The shame is truly surprising. I wanted to do it for Jessica and failed. She throws me a “good try“ before stepping up herself.

Jessica was a gymnast when she was younger, and the training appears to be paying off as she mounts the unstable rope ladder. (It also occurs to me that the view I currently have is one the paparazzi would kill for.) She deploys a disciplined crawl, gets tantalizingly close to the red button, reaches for it—and loses her balance, flips over, and lands flat on the cushion, laughing. “Holy shit,“ she yells. “It’s so hard. That’s so frustrating.“

The carny asks if we’d like to try again. She pauses for a moment, looking at the button, and then, with obvious reservations, demurs.

“You were really, really close,“ I tell her.

“I know,“ she says, still staring at it, reluctant to move, apparently, without conquering the damn thing. “That’s how it gets you.“

Next up is something called the Hi-Striker, a game in which you swing a mallet to test your strength. I take three feeble swings, each one less successful than the last. A huge Hispanic man laughs every time I bring the mallet down on the metal block, and when I exit the cage and hand it off to the female attendant, she takes one exhibition swing and makes my emasculation complete. Up goes the projectile. Ping goes the bell.

J.B. watches, rapt. “Look at her awesome stance,“ she whispers, absorbing the details, memorizing the motion. Some actors “find“ their characters via a process of internalization—investigating emotions, plumbing psychology, creating an “inner life.“ This is known as the inside-out approach. Other actors work outside-in—developing a walk, a gesture, a physicality. Look at, say, Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby. Look at Jessica Biel in the Hi-Striker cage.

Mimicking the attendant’s, her first swing easily skunks my best effort. And she improves with each attempt. She’s getting into character. As she exits the cage, there’s a look of satisfaction on her face. She returns the mallet to the attendant, who looks at me and says: “She did better than you.“

As we leave, I ask her: “Is it more technique than strength?“

She shakes her head. “Brute strength,“ she says. “You just throw it up and slam it as hard as you can.“

On our way off the pier, we pass Zoltar, the animatronic fortune-teller who turned that kid into Tom Hanks in Big. Zoltar senses us and speaks: “Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.“

Zoltar makes Jessica smile. She digs his philosophy.

Jessica Biel’s destiny, at least of late, has led her to a prominent place in the trashy supermarket gossip rags. First it was snapshots of social excursions with second-banana studs (Chris Evans, Ryan Reynolds). Then, upping the ante, there was a beach fling with a sports icon (Derek Jeter). And then, in February, she grabbed the tabloid brass ring for reportedly nabbing the world’s most eligible bachelor, Justin Timberlake. Unsurprisingly, it’s not something she’ll discuss.

One thing she is happy talking about, though, is the unladylike girth of her knuckles. We’re getting dinner at an unassuming Italian trattoria across the street from the pier when she flashes those meaty joints and describes her nascent production company. “It was almost called Fat Knuckle Films. Because I have fat knuckles. See?“ she asks. “They don’t really look that way until you start putting rings on them, and then it stops right there.“

I have to say, Jessica Biel’s chunky midfingers are endearing, human, attainable—a word she uses a number of times in our conversation, as if to remind the world that she’s just a regular girl from Boulder, Colorado, who happens to have been called, by Esquire magazine in 2005, the Sexiest Woman Alive.

She shifts her weight forward and goes on: “But after I got over that, I just started to embrace it. I started thinking, If I ever do have kids, and if they have kids, I can tell them: You know what? Your grandma in 2000-and-whatever was the Sexiest Woman Alive. How about that, kids?’ That’s what I started to think about. I’ll always have that picture to say, That’s what Granny used to look like.’ “

Before coming out here to get my ass handed to me at the Hi-Striker, I immersed myself in Jessica Biel’s Collected Works. She got her start in the mid-’90s on 7th Heaven, the WB dramedy that made a splash with the moral-values set, before leaving around 2002 for bigger (and badder) things. It’s been a grim scene ever since: Summer Catch (2001), which starred Freddie Prinze Jr. and stands at number forty-nine on Rotten Tomatoes’ 100 Worst- Reviewed Films of All Time. The Rules of Attraction (2002), notable only for Fred Savage shooting heroin between his toes and saying things like “I can feel my dick.“ (Remarkably, Biel comes across as fresh and charming, despite the astonishing pointlessness and nihilism of the flick.) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), which was Biel’s first top billing and is her biggest box-office performer to date, with a take of about $80 million. J.B. screams her head off throughout the movie and is entirely believable in distress, but you can’t help thinking as you watch her, There’s got to be better material than this. Sadly, no. There was an atrocity called Cellular, in 2004, and Blade: Trinity that same year (in which Biel kicks much undead ass as a midriff-baring vampire hunter). But the nadir has to be London, in ’06, a delusional piece of trash that starts off with a sex scene, Biel on top, saying, “Are you coming? Are you coming?“ before she proceeds to another not-quite-dignified act and then dips out of the frame to, presumably, swallow. Like I said, a grim scene.

And then, just in the nick of time, salvation arrived. A script called The Illusionist, to star Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. There was a problem, though. The filmmakers didn’t want to give Biel an audition. They weren’t convinced the vampire-hunting Hollywood creation could rearrange herself into the role of a refined fin de siècle Hungarian duchess.

But Jessica Biel has a hard time taking no for an answer. And when another actress “dropped out“ of the film, her tenacity paid off. They finally brought her in. She arrived wearing a full period costume. She made them take her seriously, she says, and three days later, an offer arrived.

The Illusionist wasn’t what you’d call a “hit,“ but it got good reviews, made decent money, and changed the industry’s perception of her. Doors that were closed began to open. They just weren’t opening fast enough for her taste.

She sets down her after-dinner tea and says, “I want choices. I want options. I want to lay out all the directions I could go and have the ability to choose. I’m slowly starting to have that now.“

It’s the “slowly“ that kills her.

One film that will almost surely expedite the process is I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, which will be released this month. It stars Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two Brooklyn firefighters who pretend to be a gay couple in order to receive domestic-partner benefits. J.B. plays the female lead, their hoodwinked attorney who falls for Sandler by the end of the picture.

Chuck and Larry is Jessica’s first real shot at popular, mainstream film success. Unlike her previous big-budget endeavors, it doesn’t rely on CGI or fetishistic weaponry to make its points. It is also—apologies to Freddie Prinze Jr. —her first comedy.

“It was a little bit intimidating,“ she says. “I really admire Adam and Kevin, but then, I didn’t try to equal them or one-up them, and the character I created didn’t have to be that. She’s the straight woman, but very fun and very cool and just—attainable. That’s the kind of part that I’d like to play more. I mean, a vampire hunter? Is that really attainable? I’d just like to play something a little more quirky, interesting, outrageous. And uninhibited.“

“You’re not worried that she can do comedy,“ the movie’s director, Dennis Dugan, tells me. “You can tell she can do comedy. So we just met her and cast her. I really think she can have one of those diverse, Oscar-winning careers. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no horizon to her talent.“

The sun has gone down, and we’re standing on the sidewalk in front of the Italian joint, across from the pier. I’m holding a small stuffed Spider-Man doll that Jessica won as a prize back at the amusement park and which she’s given to me to give to my son. I ask what she’s doing tonight, and she says she’s playing chaperone to a girlfriend on a first date. “Basically, I’m her wingman tonight,“ she says. “I’ll probably slip away if it’s rolling along well.“

She graciously agrees to a photograph with me, which I would include except for two reasons: (1) I don’t want to make Justin Timberlake jealous, and (2) you never quite understand how unattractive you are until you see yourself in a picture with Jessica Biel.

I watch her as she walks toward the pier. I know it’s where her car is parked, but I have this image of her heading straight back to the Pier Plank Plunge. The carny won’t know who she is, nobody on the pier will recognize her, and she’ll just hand over her fiver and go at it. That red button, almost within her reach. Attainable.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.